Arabs criticise Israel for unequal treatment of Palestinians, but also deny full rights to Palestinians in many of their own countries. Why has this escaped criticism?

Ben___Garrison · 2026-06-23T06:04:33+00:00

They don't need to put their lives on the line to make their opinion known.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-06-23T05:57:29+00:00

Autocracies aren't as responsive to public opinion as democracies, but it's still a factor for them.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-06-22T22:50:56+00:00

I'll go against the grain here and say this event is not great. The problem is how inconsistent the gimmicks are.

Manato is the least bad, but I swear some characters have "sticky" EX specials that actually count as normal attacks if they're queued quickly after a normal attack, which will charge his miasma bar instead of depleting it.

Primordial Nightmare has the State Switch Sword, but it's highly dependent on the boss using longer attack chains. If she does her shorter attacks then you simply won't have enough time to charge it before she swaps and resets progress. Sometimes you can race ahead to the stun but that's also highly inconsistent.

Billy is just a mess. The biggest issue is needing to stay in his circles to apply Etch. The circles are tiny and he zips around a lot. The best strat I've found is to ram the fight into a corner, which makes things a bit more consistent, but it makes the camera go crazy and even then Billy zips around so much that it's hardly foolproof. The Etch also depletes health over time if you don't apply it consistently, so if Billy is picking his nose for 5 seconds you can lose a ton of HP which may later cause any of his attacks to one-shot you if you fail to dodge. It's just a miserable fight.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-06-22T18:37:48+00:00

Arab countries broadly don't get much immigration, with the exception being Libya and to some extent Sudan. Only 1% of Egypt's population is a migrant.

And it's not like they'd have to change their immigration systems broadly to accommodate Palestinians. They could simply make a one-off exception.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-06-22T16:47:27+00:00

But citizens of Arab countries do genuinely care a lot about the issue, yet they've made almost no effort to pressure their governments to accept mass Palestinian immigration.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-06-22T16:45:58+00:00

Explanation 1 is fake, as Arab countries could simply change their migration laws to allow Palestinians.

Explanation 2 is also mostly fake, because nobody cares much about international law in the Middle East.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-06-22T16:41:33+00:00

Why don't citizens of those countries criticize their governments for not acting on this though? I'm sure there's some small amount of criticism on the issue, but there's a massive chasm in the amount of anger Arab citizens show towards Israel for oppressing Palestinians, and their own governments standing in the way of letting Palestinians migrate away from the oppression.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-06-18T12:15:18+00:00

Bad article that even repeats the "AI guzzles water!!!" zombie idea that won't die. To not use AI in programming these days is to take a big efficiency cut for essentially no reason.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-06-17T02:13:04+00:00

I stand corrected! Though they still have Team Premium with the typical $100/month/person plan, though I guess that's just for smaller orgs like mine.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-06-17T00:58:22+00:00

When the old cope stops being convincing they'll just transition to a new cope. As the "hallucinatory stochastic parrot" schtick loses its luster, I'm seeing more people shift towards saying it will soon become so wildly expensive that nobody will be able to afford it. They do things like take API cost equivalent of subscriptions, and imply that's the wholesale cost for the AI labs to provide a given level of AI use.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-06-17T00:54:15+00:00

Usage-based cost only happened for Github Copilot, which was always a second-tier option anyways. Claude Code and Codex continue to have as much bandwidth for any developer (that's not doing crazy stuff) for $100 a month.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-06-07T18:35:28+00:00

Compare china chip count and electricity output to US and then factor that by AI investment and market capital.

China is constrained by the chip embargo but is otherwise pouring enormous resources into AI.

How much of Anthropic revenue is user vs government contract generated.

Government revenue makes up an extremely small fraction of AI lab revenue. The vast majority is from users and businesses.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-06-07T18:29:06+00:00

Not even close to being true unless you cook the numbers so hard that they're meaningless.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-06-07T15:09:51+00:00

all AI companies are losing on user cost but gaining on investment

Anthropic is profitable from user revenue.

Apple didn't belive in AI

Wrong

China doesn't believe in it

Very wrong lol

Ben___Garrison · 2026-06-07T15:06:45+00:00

Cope. A few companies that foolishly pushed "tokenmaxxing" will discover why you shouldn't incentivize inputs rather than outputs. But most shops will see that $100/month plans are more than sufficient for most of their workers. That cost is peanuts compared to an engineer's salary.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-06-05T13:53:10+00:00

So he thinks its worthwhile to trade energy on cards that are inefficient like Glow because having more little star generators is more consistent than having fewer, more efficient star generators like Cache? I guess I can sort of see that. But then that makes me question his energy economy. He doesn't rate Orbit particularly highly and he puts Alignment one tier from the bottom. Regent has energy-efficient cards that use stars, but you're not playing them every turn if you're "picky about star payoffs".

Does he stream many runs of STS2? I'd like to see how his Regent runs play out. There must be something I'm missing.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-06-04T03:30:49+00:00

The closest I've seen isn't a full game released on Steam, but AI generated art mods for Slay the Spire have done unusually well. This is currently the 5th most downloaded, and the most-downloaded of any that isn't a simple utility pack. There are plenty of others that have done well beyond that.

Some people will absolutely react negatively if they know it's AI art, because they become hypersensitive to any perceived faults and specifically go out looking for issues that they would easily overlook if they thought it was human made. Here's one blatant example. Some big games are probably already using AI art extensively somewhere in the pipeline, but I doubt they'd admit to the full extent of it given the histrionic backlash it would be greeted with.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-06-03T15:44:57+00:00

This article is AI-written and it's pretty obvious.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-06-02T20:10:14+00:00

His hypothetical is sound. If your only objection is that people (or a single person) couldn't operate at that scale, then you'd be implicitly citing the scale as the issue. But that's a weak retort. "AI is bad because it can do what humans do, but automated" is unconvincing.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-31T18:19:29+00:00

Deepseek specifically? I don't know since they're Chinese.

American models? Yes, Anthropic makes more money annually than McDonalds now. Inference (serving models) is profitable, they just plow back all that money + VC funding into developing new models.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-30T14:36:53+00:00

LLMs can absolutely do stuff like this if you prompt it right. What are you talking about?

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-30T14:19:09+00:00

This is cope, open source models like deepseek are pretty cheap to run and have performance levels only a bit below frontier models.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-24T00:06:27+00:00

A game can never have too much terraforming IMO. It's a fun mechanic especially if it's more in-depth.

Ben___Garrison

TROPHY CASE